Placement of "Dynamic Object Removal" in autoware.universe Repository

[davutcanakbas]

Pointcloud map cleaning task #3419

I've developed a new package the Dynamic Object Removal package. I'm seeking advice from the Autoware community on where to best integrate this package within the repository. Thank you for your guidance!

[maxime-clem]

Thank you for your contribution, the package looks very interesting and useful to the Autoware community.

As an alternative option, have you considered keeping your package on a separate repository ? If I understand correctly, your package is not meant to be used during the Autoware execution, and so it could be proposed as an external tool living in another repository. Some reference to your package can be added in the Autoware documentation (e.g., as a how-to guide on "how to remove dynamic obstacles from a pointcloud map"). This would be similar to how some tools are kept on separate repositories (https://github.com/tier4/caret, https://github.com/tier4/CalibrationTools, ...).

[kminoda]

From autowarefoundation/autoware.universe#4977 (comment)

Sorry for not catching up, and thank you for contributing your awesome work!

Assuming that the package does not run online besides Autoware, but rather a preprocessing tool for pointcloud map, I vote for placing it somewhere else, e.g. in another repository like @maxime-clem proposed. I think there are several advantages for this option:

• It would definitely make it easier for developers to contribute to your project
• Not only Autoware users but also non-Autoware users are also able to use your project easily (on the other hand, if we put the project in Autoware, users would have to clone all the Autoware related packages even if they don't want to)
• It would be easier for Autoware beginners to understand the package structure of Autoware by only including the packages that may launched on runtime via autoware_launch

I would suggest making it a separate repository first, and if it turns out that it's better to put it in Autoware Universe, we can merge it into the repos then. I think it is difficult to do the vice versa.

[meliketanrikulu]

I agree this comment. It is not a tool that needs to work in Autoware all the time, so I think it should be independent from Autoware Universe. It might be better to open a new repo within Autoware and share it.

@davutcanakbas By the way, thank you for this awesome work ! I think it is very useful and necessary for mapping operations. We also want to test it as soon as possible .

[davutcanakbas]

@maxime-clem @kminoda @meliketanrikulu Thank you for your kind words! The reason for placing this package inside the autoware.universe is that it needs to work together with another package within autoware.universe, namely lidar_centerpoint.

Of course, we are open to any suggestions, and we can do it as you wish.

[kminoda]

Thank you for the response 🙏

Understood that the package is dependent on lidar_centerpoint. But still, as long as it is intended to run without autoware.launch.xml in autoware_launch, I believe it is beneficial to put it in the other repository.

Some approaches you may take about the lidar centerpoint are

1. Clone autoware.universe and build it whenever you use dynamic_object_removal package.
2. Just copy and paste lidar_centerpoint in Autoware Universe to your repository (be careful with the copyrights though)
3. Use some other lidar object detection model and incorporate it in your repository

I think 2 or 3 would be the ideal approaches, since the lidar centerpoint in Autoware Universe are tuned for online inference.

[davutcanakbas]

refer

How should I integrate 'center_point' into it? Do you think it would be sufficient to fetch it from the universe and provide attribution? @maxime-clem @kminoda @meliketanrikulu @mitsudome-r

[kminoda]

Here was my suggestion: https://github.com/orgs/autowarefoundation/discussions/3806#discussioncomment-7042708 🙏
(But maybe there's other way to do address your issue)

[mitsudome-r]

One thing you can do is you can clone your repository with the same workspace as autoware.
Something similar to Calibration Tools from TIER IV:

cd ~/autoware/src/universe/external/
git clone <url-to-your-object_removal_package.git>
cd ~/autoware/
rosdep install -y --from-paths src --ignore-src --rosdistro $ROS_DISTRO
colcon build --symlink-install --cmake-args -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release --packages-up-to dynamic-object-removal